Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll assembled their staff for a Champagne toast to mass death on the commencement of hostilities against Iraq. Stoll called it "my war." CNN maintains a running update here of Americans killed in Ira's war.

On February 6, 2003, Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll wrote, in all seriousness, of a pending anti-war demonstration that the "the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution."

The June 9, 1995 Wall Street Journal quoted an SEC complaint against New York Sun backer Bruce Kovner as saying Kovner had "altered and destroyed" subpoenaed evidence. We wish you'd do the same to the daily print run of your God-awful newspaper, Bruce.

Also, Professor G. Harlan Reynolds alleged on August 27, 2002 - when the Sun was several months in publication - that Seth Lipsky and Ira Stoll had not yet paid him for a piece authored for their inaugural issue.

Before signing off let me post brief comment on Seth and Ira's latest attempt to beat down dissent, or, rather, to crank up their own already formidable hysteria, further marginalize themselves, and drive off the few remaining readers who aren't of a similarly kooky cast of mind. In the Seymour Hersh smear that is "The Perle Perplex," the two Great Brains suggest, inter alia, that on-the-record criticisms by non-Americans are somehow unworthy of attention, as are off-the-record criticisms by Americans; that Richard Perle, by being a "part-time and unpaid" government servant is somehow less powerful a figure than Brent Scowcroft, "Chas. W. Freeman," or Stephen P. Cohen (an expert favored by that keenest of keen studies, "Thos. Friedman"; and, indeed, that Hersh has "turned."

The concluding paragraph is worthy reproducing here. In wondering why Seymour Hersh chooses to train his fire on Perle, a titan relative to nonentities such as Freeman or Cohen, Seth and Ira allow that:

It may be about a lot of things - the war, say, or hostility to capitalism. Or even Israel, as Mr. Perle is among those many of us who support the Jewish state as a strategic ally of American that shares the American values of freedom and democracy. Back in the 1990s, Mr. Hersh wrote a book about Israel's nuclear deterrent, "The Sampson Option," that was so hostile to Israel that even such a distinguished dove as the Washington Post's Stephen S. Rosenfield wrote in a review that it conveyed the message that "Israel is scarcely a state worth serious defending." Mr. Hersh's book, Mr. Rosenfeld wrote, "comes from a quarter not so much critical of Israel [sic] and American policy, as many people are, as fundamentally uncomfortable with the notion of a Jewish state." Whatever Mr. Hersh's beef with Mr. Perle, you can bet it's not about his business ties.

So in addition to being a "terrorist," a reckless charge at a time when Perle himself is prosecuting a "War on Terror," Hersh, by questioning a public figure, is now what?

It would have been nice had Seth and Ira reported how Stephen S. Rosenfeld has made something of a career out of attacking Hersh and his work for the Post.

This "critiquing and correcting The New York Times" thing has rapidly become a mania for us here at LFLS. After yesterday's crack at it, I began to realize the absence of a smarterobserver. Allow me to present myself - a man whose thirst for victims, victims, victims has grown as unslakable as Ira's - as ready to plug that gaping hole.

The current New York Observer wastes space with an announcement that some poor woman has been snared by a moral retard "Conservative Jewish" newspaperman. Though we here at smarterobserver consider a poor chocie in the marriage market to be about as newsworthy as a poor choice in the Hunts Point Market. If you're determined to waste newsprint and the valuable time of your readership, Anna Jane Grossman, please do so without resorting to outright falsehood, as you do when you write that the previously respected "boundaries" governing a burgeoning intra-office romance "rapidly got fuzzier than the demarcation line of the West Bank."

Did I ever mention that I'm, like, the hugest fan of Ira Stoll's smartertimes? I understand that the demands of drumming up five pages of original copy daily tax old Ira endlessly, his smartertimes salvos losing intensity and duration continuously since the Sun's launch. That in mind, I'm going to give this smartertimes thing a go. After all, today's Times has a doozy of an article.

Greg Myre's "An Israeli Raid Yields Dead Militant and Innocent Victim" confused us from the get go. The headline suggests that two people were killed: a "militant" and an "innocent victim" (I learned to deploy the scare quotes by studying Ira; pretty neat, eh?). But this is contradicted almost immediately. The fourth paragraph reads:

A pair of early morning Israeli Army raids in Gaza killed 10 Palestinians today, including a leading militant in the Islamic Jihad movement, and netted seven arrests.

What? It was two raids not one, with 10 people, not two, killed. Whoa, Howell, I'm filing this one under "Can't Count."

Seething anti-Americanism is in as plain evidence as innumeracy. After 850+ words detailing the deaths of foreigners, Howell's man Myre lets it slip that, oh, an American also was killed. The commitment of the pointy-headed elites of West 43rd Street to this country has always been suspect, though they seldom bury a lede so egregiously.

Ira Stoll defaces the front page of Michael Steinhardt's Sun with a bylined piece this morning in which he takes a Brooklyn College professor to task for extramural writings Stoll finds insufficiently deferential to premodern belief system. We'd agree with William Donohue's characterization, quoted by Stoll, of the professor's scribblings as "inane." And we'd leave it at that. But Stoll goes further, devoting several hundred words to an essay so unremarkable that it could conceivably have originated with one of the professor's students. And Stoll's piece is less remarkable yet, appearing to us as little more than a labored excuse to type K.C. Johnson's name yet another time. If you thought that a paper so disrespectful of Constitutionally protected personal freedom (viz., Ira's demand that anti-war protestors be tried for treason) would make a concession to academic freedom, you are mistaken, my friend. Religion is good, good, good, and anyone in disagreement be damned. Or failing that be cashiered from the professorate.

If Ira wants to overlook the the various Crusades, Thirty Years Wars, and innumerable Bible-fueled imperialist predations (i.e., history), as well as the careers of Eric Rudolph, Baruch Goldstein, and Mohammad Atta, in making his point that world religions provide adequate moral guidance for the blood-free navigation of an ambiguous world, so be it. We, after all, find ourselves in occasional agreement with the clerics.

No time, and, frankly, no energy to devote to the Sun and its illimitable idiocy today. I note only in passing the sleazy Arab-bait-and-word-switch perpetrated down SethAndIranistan way. Time was when Seth could be counted upon to wring his hands over the coming conflagration of the Islamic world, for Seth's buddy Cocktailing Christopher Hitchens to fret about Islamofascism, and for unremarkable opinion authors to express pleasure over an American audience which "finally seems ready to see militant Islam play the role of the bad guy."

Yeah, that Islam's some wacky stuff, isn't it, Seth and Ira?

Note though the linguistic shift in today's wholly predictable (possibly David Horowitz ghost-written) editorial: "How did it happen that our friends [sic] on the left, who like to think of themselves as idealists, have not joined the fight to shore up support for the idea of democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world?" I guess if you focus on the Arab world, you needn't consider the sad case of Afghanistan, the inconvenient indicator of the unelected creep's commitment to the newly liberated.